# Northwood built eight satellite ground units in four weeks

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/northwood-built-eight-satellite-ground-units-in-four-weeks/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Bridgit Mendler](https://realalpha.app/people/bridgit-mendler/) · CEO & Co-founder, Northwood Space · Co-founded Northwood Space, building shared satellite ground infrastructure; earlier a Disney Channel actress and singer.
- Host: [John Coogan](https://realalpha.app/people/john-coogan/) · Co-host, TBPN · Co-founded Soylent and Lucy; OpenAI bought his show TBPN in April 2026.
- Host: [Jordi Hays](https://realalpha.app/people/jordi-hays/) · Co-host, TBPN · Founded Branded Native; co-founded fintech Capital, which Rho bought.
- Show: TBPN
- Episode: [🦞 Moltbot / Clawdbot Creator Peter Steinberger, Palmer Luckey, and more](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/), Jan 27, 2026
- Moment: 2:18:39 to 2:22:20 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/northwood-built-eight-satellite-ground-units-in-four-weeks/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8319

## Quote

> “We can successfully say that now we have actually done production on **eight portal units**.”
> — [Bridgit Mendler](https://realalpha.app/people/bridgit-mendler/) at [2:19:41](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8381) · TBPN

## Takeaways

1. Eight units were produced in the factory in four weeks.
2. The units were operating within 12 hours of arrival.
3. Northwood handles ground hardware, software, and network backhaul.

## About this segment

Northwood produced eight units in four weeks and had them operating within 12 hours of arrival. Its three-month contract-to-service cycle shows how an integrated ground stack can speed satellite operations.

From “🦞 Moltbot / Clawdbot Creator Peter Steinberger, Palmer Luckey, and more”, Jan 27, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/)

## Transcript

From the transcript TBPN publishes with the episode.

[2:18:45](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8325) Congratulations. Amazing. Amazing. About the actual progress. I mean, I remember hearing about this from Deleon when it was, like, just an idea. And then and then I think I saw a video maybe with Jason Carmen, the first deployment. You're building this. Like, what is the scale of the deployment? How are you I mean, you're in a manufacturing space. How many people are working there, or how many of these things are you building?

[2:19:08](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8348) Explain this to us. Yeah. Yeah. We we're at our 35,000 square foot manufacturing facility now. I think we we've moved in here thinking this was gonna be a a long term home for us, but as I'm sure a bunch of these companies say, fills up really fast. Yep. We had have had a busy year. It's been a year of, you know, going from early concepts with some exciting problems that we were looking to solve on the ground side. We're looking to address scaling up communications to a bunch of different orbits, really pushing the boundaries on where you can take dynamic space capabilities. Our phased array was really well aligned with that. So we kinda built out the solution, and we took it through to deployment.

[2:19:47](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8387) We can successfully say that now we have actually done production on eight portal units. They're produced in this factory in the span of four weeks. Yeah. We shipped them out. It actually got shipped out on a commercial airliner to its destination halfway around the world and was up and running as soon as it hit the site within twelve hours. So Wow. All in all, from the time of our contract signature to actually being ready to take satellite passes is a three month time period. So we're we're excited by that. Wow.

[2:20:18](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8418) And and walk me through sort of, like, the like, I've seen these memes of like you ask a question on Google and it takes you through like, you know, you go through the fiber optic cable, you go to the base station, you go to cell tower. Like walk me through the actual, you know, use case from someone trying to use the Internet and then interfacing like Northwood is in the chain somewhere. Like, what is the full chain?

[2:20:42](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8442) No. That's a really great question because a lot of the ground equation has been kind of these fragmented pieces. Right? Like, I can imagine it's it's confusing. It's like, oh, there's this one piece of hardware, whether it's a phased array or a parabolic or whatever. Yeah. How does that fit in with, you know, me making use of Internet through space? Yeah. And the real the real point for us is that we are saying space companies shouldn't have to consider the ground equation when they're running their own business. They shouldn't be trying to navigate, you know, land leases in all of these countries around the world to make contact with their spacecraft. What Northwood does is we we own the entire stack.

[2:21:19](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8479) So we handle from the moment that there's a contact made with the spacecraft all the way to the the point of presence somewhere around the world that a spacecraft operator has themselves hosted, that that entire chain. So that includes hardware, that includes modem, that includes network backhaul, that includes software interfaces, APIs, and the actual control plane for moving that data. That's kind of a stack end to end on ground that hasn't been managed by a third party ground provider before. And so that's what gets us excited because when we take on that big that big chunk of the pie, we actually free up a lot of mental bandwidth and and speed for space companies.

[2:21:57](https://realalpha.app/v/c4kLgSWUfC8/?t=8517) So for a space company, they're putting a satellite in orbit for some reason, whatever they're doing, when are they calling you? When are they making sure that they're compatible or ready to integrate? Is that, presumably before launch, but does it need do do they need to do anything special on the actual